Being environmentally responsible in the United States — is so hopelessly impossible — that it's funny — comments from a German journalist

10 September 2019

Let's go down with the ship, laughing

German journalist Anna Clauss's recent experience in the United States relived my own from two years previously:

It wasn't actually my intention to destroy planet Earth when I flew off to Colorado in July for a two-month stint at the Denver Post. But now, like all those around me, I am leading the life of a climate killer.

Here in Denver, I drive to work every day in an SUV, I drink beer from an aluminum can and sip coffee out of a Styrofoam cup using a plastic straw. Every time I go shopping, I come home with at least five plastic bags.

I have begun to lose faith that I can help save humanity with the cloth tote bag I brought from Germany. Indeed, the German plan to protect the climate looks downright absurd when viewed from the other side of the Atlantic.

Even if the Greens were to turn Germany into an eco-dictatorship . . . it wouldn't help the world. At least not as long as people in countries like the U.S. have a massively larger carbon footprint than we do in Germany.

I tell myself that global warming likely can't be stopped anyway. And I remind myself that 99 percent of all species that once existed on Earth are no longer here, and that humans are likely no exception.

I have dedicated myself to fatalism and realized that it's actually quite fun. After all, I have the example of a huge number of Americans to follow.

I had the same reaction

In 2017, when I returned home after a 3 year stint in Germany — the United States' virtually complete lack of environmental consciousness stood out.

In fact, it seemed to me that our infatuation with plasticizing and vehicle size-escalation had grown during my three year absence.

It is no wonder that plastic fills the oceans and some bloodstreams. Nor that greenhouse gases ramp up their eager sky work.

As Anna Clauss points out (in the above extract), you cannot do anything in America, without poking Environmental Sustainability's eye.

That's just the American Way.

And I do have to laugh, when American leadership points fingers at China and India. Their per capita "waste and pollution totals" are nowhere near our own.

The moral? — Let's giggle, while Homo sapiens cavorts itself into Trouble

I am optimistic enough to think that humans will adapt to the messes we make.

Though the coming environments are probably not ones, that I would want to occupy. Even if I did get to live forever.

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Being environmentally responsible in the United States — is so hopelessly impossible — that it's funny — comments from a German journalist